2024 Baseball Viewing Stats

The moment I first laid eyes on the email message, I muttered to myself, “Urgh... more junk.” But this time it wasn’t junk. It was our annual MLB viewing stats for 2024.

Just like last year, my wife and I killed it. We watched 287 games this year, up about 0.7% from the 285 games we streamed last year. We viewed 127 Milwaukee Brewers games, an 8.5% increase over the 117 games we watched in 2023. And in terms of the number of hours we spent taking in baseball in front of the TV, we spent a 450 hours of our precious time in this world watching baseball this year, a 5.5% decrease over the 476 hours of viewing time we logged last year. I suppose that’s what moderation looks like for us.

Our Brewers “viewing record” was 70-57 (.551 pct), which was slightly worse than the 93-69 (.574 pct) record that the team posted for the entire 2024 regular season. Sorry about that, Brewers fans. It seems we’re bad luck.

We managed to see all 30 MLB teams play in 2024. For some reason, we only saw 28 play last year.

I must confess that a good part of me feels like this is all a bit excessive. We did slip a bit from being in the top 7% of MLB viewers last year to the top 9% of MLB viewers in 2024. But that still leads me to conclude that a significantly large bracket of fans above us are even more addicted to watching baseball than we are. Where Brewers fans are concerned, however, there is not quite as much space between us and the ceiling: we have been in the top 1% of that group for the past three seasons.

Interestingly, the graphic I got from MLB also indicated that our top streaming device was our Roku TV.

For years we had been running an old Mac Mini hooked up to our not-totally-dumb but also less-than-smart Samsung TV. The streaming experience with that older setup sucked. We had a cheap remote control-sized keyboard that was totally janky and that lost its Bluetooth connection to the computer after a few minutes. Getting that connection back was a pain. Firing up the computer, starting up a web browser, navigating to a website, and getting a video stream going were all exercises in self-imposed technological asceticism.

Toward the end of the 2023 baseball season, we finally broke down and purchased a Roku smart TV. It was a transformative, even overwhelming experience. Not only were we able to get 24/7 access to all manner of bad programming like classic early 1980s-era Bob Barker on the “Price is Right: The Barker Era” Roku channel—a topic perhaps for another blog post. We were also able to install the MLB app on our new TV and stream games with but a few button clicks on a beautifully simple remote control. I’m sure this contributed to the increase in the number of games we watched. Again, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.

Say what you will, but we get good value out of the subscription fee we pay to access those games.